The present invention relates to the field of input devices, and more specifically, to automatically and proactively switching between input method editors.
Written languages using large numbers of characters that represent words or morphemes, sometimes referred to as ideographic characters, face complication when trying to provide input from standard computing input devices, such as a standard keyboard. Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, may have thousands of characters that can be used in written expression. Phonetic Romanization has been used in which the phonetic pronunciation of the character is represented in Romanized or Latinized characters that are produced using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Romanization or Latinization is the conversion of writing from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script. Methods of Romanization of written text include transliteration, converting text from one written type of script to another, and transcription, which is the systematic representation of language in written form. For example, a given input could be transcribed by a computing device by generating a string corresponding to the input. Transcription methods include the first transcription (such as phonetic, radical, image (handwriting), audio (speech) transcripts), which associate with well-defined and mapped meaningful ideographic symbol (second transcription). Any of above transcription mapping methods can be developed as an input method. Users can input the first transcription into a special input method program to produce a second transcription. For instance, pinyin input method is one of most popular input methods for generating Chinese characters using a traditional Latin keyboard.
For Mandarin Chinese, for example, pinyin is a phonetic system for transcribing the sound of Chinese characters into Romanized script. Pinyin enables a user to identify a Chinese character by the phonetic pronunciation of the Chinese character, whose sound is described by the transcribed Romanized script. A pinyin-based input method editor allows users input Romanized characters to generate Chinese characters. Generally, numerous input method editors may exist, and a user may install multiple distinct input method editors for Chinese input.